According to the latest news from YCD, sports e-commerce giant Fanatics raised $700 million in its latest round of financing, with a total valuation of $31 billion. The investment was led by Clearlake Capital, with participation from old shareholders Silver Lake, Fidelity and Softbank.
Fanatics was born in Florida, USA in 1995. It started by selling sports equipment. Now it has developed into a global sports giant with business in more than 100 countries around the world. It has 94 million fans and cooperates with more than 900 leagues and brands. The NHL, NBA, Major League Baseball, and many European soccer clubs have signed exclusive licensing agreements, taking the rights to sell merchandise for multiple teams.
Fanatics has grown rapidly over the past year. In August 2021, Fanatics won the exclusive right to issue MLB star cards, interrupting the MLB exclusive sales right that Topps had monopolized for more than 60 years; in October of the same year, Fanatics cooperated with the International Olympic Committee to establish the first global Olympic online store , to sell products for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, the 2026 Milan-Cortina Olympic Games and the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games.
At the beginning of the year, Fanatics had just completed a round of financing of US$1.5 billion, and its valuation soared to US$27 billion. Since then, a series of mergers and acquisitions has been launched: In January, Fanatics spent $500 million to acquire Topps to expand into the collectibles business. In February, Fanatics acquired Mitchell and Ness, a century-old streetwear brand, for $250 million.
This summer, Fanatics ventured deeper into the collegiate scene, signing a long-term deal with Nike to make the vast majority of the apparel and headwear for the colleges with which it has a partnership. Last month, Fanatics signed the Tokyo Giants, Japan’s most popular baseball team.
Now Fanatics has set its sights on the sports betting market, plans to launch a sports betting app in 2023, and invited musician Jay-Z (who owns the sports and entertainment agency Roc Nation) to join Fanatics’ board of directors as the board of directors of Fanatics’ newly established gaming department member.
Fanatics is so optimistic about the sector’s prospects that its chief executive, Michael Rubin, predicted at Sports Business Magazine’s World Sport Congress in October that sports betting and other Fanatics businesses could generate $8 billion in annual profits over the next decade.
In August of this year, Fanatics and Foot Locker announced a new agreement that allows Foot Locker consumers to purchase officially licensed merchandise on the Fanatics platform.
In addition, Fanatics is also involved in the field of NFT, which owns Candy Digital, a digital collectibles company. The NFT platform operates independently of Fanatics and was valued at $1.5 billion in October last year. However, according to foreign media reports, Candy Digital announced the layoff of a third of its staff earlier this month due to the recent slump in cryptocurrencies and continued inflationary pressures.
Currently Fanatics has been considering an initial public offering, Michael Rubin recently met with a number of elite backbone of Wall Street companies, including Internet, retail and gaming analysts.